Eureka City Schools (ECS) serves 5,000 kindergarten through grade twelve students, offers a rich variety of educational opportunities that are unparalleled in the region, and has the most diverse population in the area. Eureka is located 250 miles north of the San Francisco Bay Area, where students are in an island economy, isolated from a world that demands skills to enter the international market.
Guided by a mission statement and organized within a strategic context, the ECS’ governing board has a policy for the wide institutionalization of service-learning. The district’s Project Serve supports service-learning as a curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular experience that connects students across the school and community with the benefits of civic engagement and responsibility. Project Serve provides all of the schools within ECS and five feeder districts with the resources to develop high-quality service-learning activities designed to meet or exceed state academic content standards. Project Serve has been in existence since 1993 and is poised to become a new leader for California as well as a national model that demonstrates the importance of sustaining service-learning practices with continuous support and funding.
Through high-quality service-learning activities, students solve problems, document progress, and present their results through the use of technology and other tools. Students also mentor each other, develop accountability, and acquire ownership of the learning process. The tenets of Project Serve include putting students in charge, requiring them to help others, and enabling diverse students to serve and study together.
Project Serve’s numerous linkages with community agencies and higher education support its schoolwide implementation by providing a regional model, which has been honed over time. A Local Evaluation Team informs the governing board and the project’s Advisory Committee as it evaluates the benefits of service-learning for students, teachers, schools, and the community and monitors progress toward districtwide institutionalization of the program. Project Serve’s model demonstrates to other districts how evaluation processes can institutionalize academic practices through the use of service-learning results that indicate student success.
With 14 years of experience in supporting a school that received the National Service-Learning Leader School award in 2000 and two Golden Bell Awards in 1999 and 2005, Project Serve is ideally suited to promote the integration of service-learning into the curriculum at all local schools. Project Serve is an outstanding model of service-learning for the state and an example to the federal government of why it is important to continue this program’s long-term funding.
